Imagining the Future (for Radio National's Future Weekend)

Imagining the future...it's become a serious business, with the rise of the corporate futurist/futurologist. But are they anything more than the sci-fi buffs of the corporate world? And who are the most successfully prophetic when it comes to predicting the future? Join a sci-fi buff and a corporate futurologist to nut it out...all part of Radio National's special Future Weekend, broadcast November 23-24, 2002.

Transcript

Natasha Mitchell: Hello, Natasha Mitchell here, with this week's edition of All in the Mind - but I've also got the pleasure of being with you here all the rest of the afternoon, where we're continuing with our weekend-long exploration of the future here on ABC Radio National. Basically we thought we'd pull out a big collective crystal ball and share some of its revelations with you on the airwaves - so plenty more treats to come.

It all got me contemplating, though, on the different ways in which we've imagined the future both now and in the past. Of course, it's something that science fiction writers have perfected the art of, everything from Isaac Asimov's ground-breaking Foundation series, to Ursula LeGuin's gender-bending The Left Hand of Darkness. And we've all heard the saying that good science fiction so often becomes science fact.

But imagining the future, it seems, has also now become big business, with the rise of the corporate "futurologist" or "futurist". And coming up is a fellow who says he's having plenty of fun being paid to daydream. But first, let's go to Justine Larbalestier, who's a Research Fellow at the University of Sydney, and her latest book The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction is a finalist in the 2002 British Science Fiction Association Awards. But basically Justine's done a hell of a lot of reading of sci-fi.

It was really the 1920s, Justine, that saw the sci-fi genre really kick off, with sci-fi magazines popping up in the States all over the place, I take it. One buff at the time - that I've read about in your book, actually - beautifully describes science fiction as "a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision". I quite like that idea, is that how you read the sci-fi genre, as almost a romance, a creative tango with the future?

Justine Larbalestier: Yes, in some ways, definitely I would emphasise more the romance side, and the storytelling side, than I would the prophetic side. But there has always been a tradition within the science fictionists' thinking, of science fiction as a genre that thinks about the future. So a lot of science fiction aficionados will say to you that "Jules Verne, he predicted the submarine, and he predicted all sorts of things long before they actually happened", but will ignore all the many, many things he predicted that never happened and never will happen. So I think a lot of a lot of the correct prophecy within science fiction is more coincidence than a tremendous ability to tell the future.

But what was new about science fiction in 1926 - which is when I really see it beginning as an actual genre called science fiction - is its thinking about technology, and its thinking about change. From the end of the 18th century onwards, there was just dramatic change, with the Industrial Revolution and all sorts of new technologies and so on, and many people were startled, and that feeling of constant change, and not being able to keep up it. And a lot of people now, you know in the 21st century, think that they're the first people to feel like that. But people have been feeling like that since the 19th century.

Natasha Mitchell: And in a sense science fiction has played out some of those anxieties. What happened in 1926?

Justine Larbalestier: In 1926 the very first science fiction, all-science-fiction magazine, was published in the States. It was called Amazing Stories, and it was published by an immigrant - from Luxembourg, of all places - called Hugo Gernsback, who's a really interesting character. He honestly believed that the point of science fiction was to educate people about science. It was great that it told a good story, and it was entertaining, but that entertainment was like a sugar coating on teaching people about science.

Natasha Mitchell: Yes, the impression I got about him, too, was that he really very much equated science with progress, and science fiction was a way of making that link apparent to the masses.

Justine Larbalestier: Absolutely, absolutely. And people who were interested in science fiction, it was like a sign of their extra intelligence, of their finger on the pulse of "now". And because "now" and what was happening was all about science and progress. Because the 20s and 30s is a time when believe it or not, engineers were not - when I went through university, engineers were legendary for drinking a lot of beer. But the "noble engineer" was an icon in the 20s and 30s, and it was something to aspire to. And bridge building, and building tall amazing buildings was just incredible, and it was a wonderful thing to aspire to. And the reputation of engineers and scientists and technologists changed a lot after the Second World War. But before, it was very positive and macho and he-manny (I'm waving my fists around).

Natasha Mitchell: In a sense the romance of science fiction could have been construed as the romance of progress?

Justine Larbalestier: Absolutely.

Natasha Mitchell: Even though this was Depression, post-Depression?

Justine Larbalestier: Yeah, I mean it is really interesting that a lot of this is going on during the Depression. And one of the really interesting things is that there were stories about atomic energy, of the atomic bomb, from about 1934.

Natasha Mitchell: Right, so I mean amongst the sci-fi community, when the bombing of Hiroshima occurred what was the reaction, do you have any sense of that?

Justine Larbalestier: There's a really kind of split reaction. On the one hand, there's the sense of "we knew this was going to happen, this is not a surprise to us". It was the same with 1969, with the first time men were on the moon, there was that same feeling of "we knew this was going to happen, we have been predicting men getting to the moon for a long, long time, we knew space travel was viable". There was that feeling, the whole postwar feeling with the space race, that linked up with kind of science fiction aspirations about space travel and the world "out there" and all that sort of thing. And a lot of these people had been pigeon-holed as nerds and weirdos, for thinking that space travel was possible or that an atomic bomb was possible.

Natasha Mitchell: It was just too fantastical for the rest of the community to cope with?

Justine Larbalestier: It was that, or they didn't even cross their radar. Then on the other hand, there were science fiction people who were distraught and really horrified, and had a real sense of the dangers of atomic fallout, and what could possibly happen.

Natasha Mitchell: And, in a sense, that they had had any association with such a horrible possibility.

Justine Larbalestier: Yeah, I mean there were some people who were really appalled.

Natasha Mitchell: This early editor of Amazing Stories, he also thought at that time that science fiction is "extravagant fiction today, cold fact tomorrow". Was that part of the early hyperbole around science and progress?

Justine Larbalestier: Yes, it definitely was. That was actually the slogan for Amazing Stories. But when you actually go back and read the stories in those magazines, there's not a lot of cold fact even of contemporary science. And science fiction's always been like that, that the idea of scientific veracity, and reflecting what's going on, and extrapolating from what we know to be scientifically true now, has never really been the majority of science fiction. It's been a tiny percentage that actually does that.

Natasha Mitchell: It must be an interesting line, though, for those quite famous sci-fi writers today, who are actually scientists or physicists.

Justine Larbalestier: Well there have actually been scientists who write science fiction from the very beginning. Heinlein was an engineer, and Asimov as everybody knows was a scientist. And there have been a wide range of them, there have been biologists, and geologists, and all sorts of people have taken their know-how about the world, and a lot of it is just absolutely fascinating.

Natasha Mitchell: But I wonder if they do it in logical, internally consistent ways, or is this their ultimate scientific play-space, to just go wild?

Justine Larbalestier: What good science fiction is, is a space in which you can extrapolate anything. So you can kind of work out what's going on, and there's something you see as a problem in the here and now, you can extrapolate and think of solutions to that. Ursula LeGuin has a really fascinating book called The Lathe of Heaven, in which this person's dreams come true. And so this psychiatrist that they're seeing - or this psychologist, I can't remember - decides to influence the dreams to make the world a better place. And the one I most vividly remember, is the person having the dreams is encouraged to dream of a world where there's no racism, where the difference between skin colour makes no difference. And in the morning, after the dream has happened, the person wakes up the world has changed, and everybody's skin colour is grey, everybody looks exactly the same.

Natasha Mitchell: Well, this is the thing about science fiction, though - I mean, we talk about it being prophetic and futuristic, but in fact it seems to me that a big part of its role has been to critique the current, the present. And perhaps it's been able to be quite overtly political - but because it's not in the mainstream, it's been quite outspoken about the present, but in a futuristic kind of context. What's your take on that?

Justine Larbalestier: I totally agree with you, absolutely. During the 1950s in America, there were a lot of short stories that were very critical of McCarthy, that appeared in the science fiction magazines. Because 300 years in the future all the names are changed, who's going to notice? And it's also a very lowbrow genre, that nobody is really paying attention to. Although there was a very famous incident during the 2nd World War, when one of the government agencies seized all copies of an issue of Amazing Stories, because there was a story about the possibility of an atomic bomb, which was totally based on scientific knowledge that was out there in the community. And it was while the Manhattan Project was underway, and they just freaked out and tried to stop all issues of the magazine - thereby kind of publicly revealing that in fact "yes, you're right, they are doing a lot of work on this". It was very silly.

Natasha Mitchell: Yes, I wonder. I mean, there is an example of science fiction not just pondering the present in the future, and critiquing it, but also actually having a tangible influence on the present. Have there been other examples of the power of science fiction to shift political agendas?

Justine Larbalestier: There's a wonderful book by H. Bruce Franklin, who's an American scholar of science fiction, and he is very convinced that a lot of rightwing science fiction in the 60s had a big influence on some of the policies of the Vietnam War. And Robert Heinlein, before the 2nd World War in America, he had written a lot of stories imagining space suits, some quite detailed descriptions of space suits, which were very close to the early models that they used. And it turned that that's because they were reading Robert Heinlein.

Natasha Mitchell: Oh, right.

Justine Larbalestier: I mean, I definitely don't think science fiction has the same kind of influence now as it did in the period up to about 1960. A lot of that is because cinema, which is much less inventive than written science fiction - and I mean, what's kind of startling to me is that so-called cutting edge science fiction films, their plots are almost identical to the kind of stuff I've been reading ad infinitum for the last ten years, that was first written in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s. Gattaca for me is a fabulous example of this. My non-science-fiction friends think it's just brilliant, and I think it's just trash.

Natasha Mitchell: Back to the question of prophecy and science fiction's capability of being a prophetic medium - I mean, you've concentrated on the early days of science fiction, when fanzines were huge, subscribers were everywhere, and people loved science fiction. And apocalyptic and futuristic visions of life as we know it were lapped up, because I guess technology was still fermenting so to speak. So I just wonder, do you think that science fiction may have lost its edge, may lose it's edge in the future, given that so many scenarios are being played out, given that life does often seem so fantastical now?

Justine Larbalestier: Yes, this has been an anxiety that science fiction people have been expressing since the end of the 2nd World War. You know now that all these things that were supposed to be far, far in the future, now that they've all happened, what's the point of science fiction? You know, it comes up every time. But every time a huge amount of scientific change happens all of a sudden, there's a lot of attention given to science fiction.

Natasha Mitchell: In a sense, a space to reflect on the role, the interaction between science and society.

Justine Larbalestier: It seems to me that it's more, it's such a part of our cultural fabric now, that we're not as aware of it, because it's been around for a long time, it's got almost a century history. The day after September 11th, I heard one of the NATO figures said "yesterday we saw science fiction become reality". So you see science fiction being used as a synonym for change for the bizarre, for the new, for the future, all the time - in a way that people don't even reflect upon. So I think it's far more pervasive than it was.

Natasha Mitchell: Justine Larbalestier, thank you so much for joining me on ABC Radio National's Futures Weekend.

Justine Larbalestier: Thank you.

Natasha Mitchell: Justine Larbalestier, writer and Research Fellow at the University of Sydney. And her latest book The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction is published by Wesleyan University Press.

Natasha Mitchell here with you, right throughout the afternoon, but now we're talking about the very process of imagining the future. Science fiction to one side, what about those dudes who get paid big dollars by corporations who want to be strategic about the direction they're heading in? The rise of the corporate "futurist", or "futurologist", is definitely a phenomenon. But is what they do anything more than what any good science fiction writer might do? Well, I've pulled in Ian Pearson, who's British Telecom's official futurologist. That's his gig, and it has been for 11 years now, but he started out in life with a degree in applied mathematics and theoretical physics, and he's author of The Atlas of the Future, and Where's IT Going?

Ian Pearson, we're talking here about imagining the future, and you're official job title is indeed Futurologist with British Telecom.

Ian Pearson: Yes.

Natasha Mitchell: And what do you think of my theory, that corporate futurologists or futurists are something like the sci-fi buffs of the corporate world? Am I even close to the reality of your working life?

Ian Pearson: There's certainly a lot of overlap between the two worlds. We get a lot of ideas from science fiction writers, and they get a lot of ideas from us, so there's a constant conversation going on between the two. And a lot of the ideas which we're working on, are so far in the future that they sound like sci-fi to most people. So there's not a huge amount of difference, really.

Natasha Mitchell: Are they sci-fi to you, though?

Ian Pearson: Definitely not. Science fiction's got a lot of artistic licence in it, and you can make story lines that sound good even if not based on real technology possibilities. We're very firmly rooted into designing technologies that will work in the real world, so we have to stay very much in line with what's possible - you know, subject to the laws of physics and chemistry and so on. And we have to design things that will actually really work.

Natasha Mitchell: So you don't ponder the possibility of teleporting, for example?

Ian Pearson: Oh, we ponder it, and then we rule it out, because we can't do it yet. I mean, the best scientists on the planet have managed to teleport an entire atom so far, and we something like 10-to-the-power-of-25 atoms, so it's going to be rather a long time before we manage to do that. A lot of the science fiction you watch is just really complete nonsense, it's just a nice story line.

Natasha Mitchell: It'd make a good movie.

Ian Pearson: That's fine, it makes a good movie, but it's not really much use for stimulating new science ideas. And you get the ones like Star Trek - and 2001: A Space Odyssey, it's probably the best science fiction book every written. They contain loads and loads of really good ideas, which are very good for stimulating engineers like ourselves. And we look at these and think "well, you know, OK that's a science fiction idea, but could we actually do it, and could we do something approximate to that?" And our favourite idea, I think, probably for most engineers working in the IT field, is something like the Star Trek holodeck, that's the sort of leisure chamber that they go into and the tell the computer what their fantasy is, and the computer makes that happen for them, and they can do whatever they want. And we look at that and think, well, obviously you can do the video bits, because you can give people sort of virtual reality goggles, and you can do the audio bits, and now we're looking at chips which we can stick into people's skin which, in due course, will link through to the nervous system and create all of the physical sensations, too. So you know, within a couple of decades we've been able to do something which looks and feels and tastes and smells like a Star Trek holodeck. You think "well, this started off as a purely science fiction concept, and no one had any idea how to do it" - now we have.

Natasha Mitchell: Yes indeed. You've made the comment before about your work, that accuracy is impossible for all but the most trivial question, but a blurred vision is better than none at all.

Ian Pearson: That's right. I don't believe anyone can predict the future accurately, but you can get some ideas of what it might look like.

Natasha Mitchell: But accuracy is not your major concern?

Ian Pearson: No, it isn't, I don't believe you can be accurate any more than a few minutes ahead. All you can do is, you can say "well in ten, fifteen years time, most of us will have flat screens hanging on our walls, and we'll have virtual fish tanks and virtual paintings and virtual windows and stuff". So you could be sitting in the middle of Sydney, and you can be looking out onto the nice girls walking up and down Bondi Beach. So you know, that would appeal to an awful lot of students, I imagine.

Natasha Mitchell: Ian Pearson, some of your views of the future are pretty fantastical, though, and often very funny. For example, you muse over a future conspiracy between high-tech toilets and the fridge, to diagnose the state of our health and our diet, and then act on it. You ponder the possibility of robot psychiatrists, and Barbie Dolls with artificial intelligence. It's pretty wild stuff. I mean, clearly a corporation like British Telecom isn't going to pay you to come up with kooky scenarios like this about the future, unless they know they're going to get something out of it.

Ian Pearson: That's right. We don't use the humour just for fun. I mean, it's nice to use to humour whenever we can, to liven things up. But the robotic psychiatrist actually already exists. There's one of my friends, Joanne Pransky, that gave me the idea, it wasn't mine. She's actually a robotic psychiatrist already, she works with - I think it's the Sankyo corporation over in the States, it deals with the psychological problems of robots on the production line. So if they're going wrong, she comes and diagnoses them, and figures out what's gone wrong with them.

Natasha Mitchell: So she's not the robot, she's attending to the mental health needs of robots.

Ian Pearson: Yes, her business card is a little robot lying on a couch with her interviewing it. So she's got a very good sense of humour.

Natasha Mitchell: It's a nice job if you can get it, though, hey Ian Pearson?

Ian Pearson: It's been said that I'm paid to daydream. I suppose to some extent that's true. But we do have to come up with sensible scenarios, we can't just come up with any predictions at all, and have those accepted. The whole point of doing this is strictly commercial. If we can come up with a really sound idea of what the future looks like, then we can identify the threats, and the opportunities facing us as a company, and we can decide which strategies we ought to be using in order to get the best opportunities and the minimum number of threats. And that is the real reason for doing this - it's very much grounded in trying to make money, ultimately. So I can't just sit and write science fiction and come up with wacky ideas, I have to come up with things which are grounded in some common sense, and have some good chance of actually happening.

Natasha Mitchell: Ian Pearson, there are clearly, though, some real quacks out there - you know, futurists and forecasters are, it would seem, just one of a growing community of gurus and consultants offering their apparently "must-have" expertise to the corporate world. So how do you then distinguish between quackery and the worthwhile work of some futurologists?

Ian Pearson: Yes, there are quite a lot of cranks out there, it attracts a lot of that sort of people, unfortunately. Most people out there have got some vision of what the future looks like. The difference between people doing it just on an amateur level, and a professional level, is really how much they've sat and thought it through, and how much they've linked it to other things that are happening in other areas. And the cranks, generally, what they do is they have a single idea, and they push it way ahead of where it belongs, and they just ignore all of the potential threats, and say "oh, we can deal with that, we can deal with that, you know, that's just a matter of education", or "this is just a matter of politics", or "people will accept it because it will be really good value". And they ignore all of these social trends, they ignore all of the human nature, they ignore all of the cost issues and the political issues, and so they come up with completely wacky predictions.

Natasha Mitchell: Now, I know you'd be the first to distance yourself from the practice of astrology, but it seems that like astrology columns, no two futurists would necessarily agree on their predictions for the future. Just how subjective, then, are the efforts of futurists?

Ian Pearson: I think the problem here, is that we are expecting futurists to come up with predictions. Really, what they do is they come up with possible scenarios. None of us knows exactly which way it's going to go in the future, but if you got ten professional futurists around a table, they would agree on 75%, 80%, of what they're saying. What they disagree with is probably the very fine detail. We would disagree quite a lot on timescales - for example, I think technology will move ahead very, very quickly; a lot of futurists would say "no, no, no, social trends will hold it back, and society can't possibly adapt that fast". And then we would have an argument that says "well, people won't have any choice but to adapt quickly", and they would say "well, yes they do", and we would argue these things through. But there isn't really any right or wrong answer on these issues.

Natasha Mitchell: Is it certainly a role of science fiction that has been a very powerful one, to look at the future, to present a future as being potentially apocalyptic and catastrophic, they become in a way critiques of the present. In working as a corporate futurologist, are you prepared to take on the dark side as well, or are there constraints in doing that, certainly in the corporate context?

Ian Pearson: Yeah, we used to have the view of trying to hide information from the public, a long, long time ago - in the sense that if we thought something through, and realised that it might not be a squeaky-clean technology, there might have been a temptation for most industries to try and hide it under the carpet. But I think an awful lot of things over the last five or six years have shown that's not a good policy. You know, if we have (for example) fantastic virtual environments where people can spend their days hanging out on Bondi Beach, even though they're in the middle of a dingy flat in the middle of a big city somewhere, that's a very, very nice social thing to be able to do. But if that's attractive enough, we might find a small percentage of people spending their entire time in there, and becoming social dropouts, and it would be very wrong for us to pretend it's anything other than that. Because people will discover their problems anyway, and then they'll blame you for hiding them under the carpet. I think futurologists have a little bit of power, in the sense that they can change people's image of what they want tomorrow, and then that changes the marketplace to a degree, and eventually makes the future happen the way that they suggested. So if you're good enough at futurology, you can make it a little bit of a self fulfilling prophecy.

Natasha Mitchell: Ian Pearson, who's British Telecom's official futurologist. A nice job if you can get it.